Facebook Events Tutorial

LakeTravis.com has a new plugin that completely automates our Upcoming Events lists. You post an Event to your Facebook page and our plugin will crawl your FB page (every 3 hours) and scrape and display those events 3 different places on LakeTravis.com. You events will be displayed on our mainpage, on our Upcoming Events page and on your page on LakeTravis.com. You build ONE Event on your Facebook page and that event is displayed on your Facebook page and 3 different places on LakeTravis.com. Our Upcoming Events page is one of the best viewed on the site.

Here’s a quick tutorial on building a Facebook event for your business.

A) We start on your Main Facebook Page.

B) On the left hand side of your Facebook mainpage click on the Events link (circled in red above). This will take you to your Events Page (see the page below). If you’ve never posted an event this page will be empty. If you’ve posted events before the previous events will be displayed here. Both past and upcoming.

C) On your Events Page (above) click the Create Event tab (circled in red). This will bring up a pop-up (see below). That is the page you will construct your event on.

From here just follow the Red Numbers (above) to complete your Event.

The Image. There will probably be an image there (your mainpage image). Click the X in the image box to delete that pic. Then click Change Event Photo to add your event photo. This will take you to a drive on your computer to locate and load the Event Image (be sure it’s landscape oriented). You’re new image should appear here.

Name the Event. Title your Event here. You need not put your business or venue name here, just the title of the Event. (example: Tuesday Night BOGO Burger Night)

Location. Start typing your business name here. Your Facebook page should pop-up under the box. Click on your FB page pop-up which should place it in the box. Now your location is set to your business.

Pick the start and end times. Facebook just added a reoccurring feature so that you can do “one time” events or recurring events. Recurring is great for those weekday or weekend specials, house bands, anything that happens on a regular basis. It’s a real time saver. Our sites picks up all these recurring events and displays them as well. Recurring can be daily, weekly monthly or custom – first Thursday, etc…

Pick the Category that best fits your event.

Here is where you write your Event Description. (Example: Come join us tonite for our buy one get one free burger night.). You’ll want more text than that. If it is a reoccurring event, you should save the descriptive to use over again.

You can add some keywords here. We usually don’t use this, but it’s probably a good idea.

Free Admission and/or Kid Friendly.

If you are selling tickets to your event you can link to the ticket page. If it’s a free event you can still use this to link to a page on your site with more info about the event. Just copy and paste the URL in the box.

Look over everything, if satisfied you can click Publish and you’ve posted your Event.

To the left of the #10 you can see the link to “Event Tips Website“. This is a great resource to learn more about Facebook Events. Once you click Publish, our pluging will scan your Facebook page with in 3 hours and place your Event 3 separate places on LakeTravis.com. No more posting events to our site. You just post an event to your Facebook Page and the rest is completely automated.

If the Event you just posted is an event that you will do more often (but you don’t want to use recurring as it may be on odd days of the week) you can Duplicate that Event. Go back to your events page (below) and find the More Button to the right of the event (see green circle). An event MUST be duplicated before it’s past though. Once an event is past, the duplicate feature goes away.

Click on the More Button (see the green circle above). One of the dropdowns will be Duplicate Event. Change the dates and click publish at the bottom and you’ve now got two events. This tool allows you to easily add many events at once.NOTE: Adding these events will publish them to your timeline. We typically go to our timeline (when we are adding many events) and click Hide From Timeline, so 4-5 events don’t show up on your timeline in a row, all at once.